But it was on the shoulders of those three men that the burden of it pressed most heavily, and the debt which Lunéville owes them is real and great. While they were doing their best inside the town to save it for France, or, at all events, to save it from being sacked and burnt, they were in a state of complete ignorance as to what was happening outside it. Rumours, of course, there were, but nothing was certain. They were surrounded on every side, left stranded on a lonely island in a German ocean of invasion. They could only guess vaguely from the nearing or receding sound of the guns and the temper of the German men and officers round them how the battle was going. Yet all the time they kept up their spirits and the spirits of all the French within the reach of their influence. At the worst they never allowed themselves to doubt—think what that meant—that the turn of the tide would come and Lunéville be joined to the mainland of France again. And they were right. Their splendid confidence in their own men and the destinies of France was justified. All the time the rush of the tide was slackening and the hour of their deliverance coming nearer. The ebb began in earnest on September 8th. On that day the young dragoon officer in whose company we began the great battle, crossed the Mortagne at Mont by a temporary bridge erected by the engineers, and after a brush with half a dozen Uhlans on the Lunéville side of it, rode with his men along the Meurthe to Rehainviller, a village only two miles from the south-west corner of the town, and found that not a German was left in it. That news he sent back by one of his men to the general, and then walked on alone, as the sun was rising, along the wall of the cemetery on the right of the road just beyond the village. “I reached,” he says, “the corner, where I stopped dead. I found myself face to face with a German captain, like me alone and on foot. He was as thunderstruck to see me as I was to meet him. Like me he had his map-case in his hand. He had been examining the country.... We looked at each other, with our eyes wide open. He felt for his revolver. Feverishly I tried to open my case. Both of us knew that this contest of speed would decide our fate, and we looked straight into each other’s eyes. Then I smiled, my revolver came out of its case, the butt tight in my hand. My arm stretched out. Then the officer no longer felt for his weapon: he knew that he was beaten. My revolver flashed. He fell, with one bullet full in his heart. The whole thing only lasted a second. It hurt me to see him lying there; he had large blue eyes, open in death.”